


These fragile bodies of touch and taste

by Yukichouji



Series: Lovers in a dangerous time [1]
Category: Archie Comics & Related Fandoms, Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Backstory, Claustrophobia, Hard of Hearing Jughead Jones, Hurt Jughead Jones, M/M, Panic Attacks, Past Betty Cooper/Jughead Jones, Protective Sweet Pea (Riverdale), Spoilers for Season 3, Trapped
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-02
Updated: 2020-03-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:21:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22990888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yukichouji/pseuds/Yukichouji
Summary: It happens so quickly Jughead doesn’t have time to react at all. He’s not even sure he manages to make a sound, before the brittle, creaky old floorboards give one last token protest beneath his feet and then just break away. The ground literally opening up beneath him and swallowing him whole. One moment he’s there with the others, following Sweet Pea through the abandoned, dilapidated residential at the edge of town, the next he’s not, his world plunged into a sudden, all-encompassing darkness.ORHoh!Jughead gets buried and trapped under some rubble with a broken hearing aid. He panics. But, luckily, he's got someone looking out for him.
Relationships: Jughead Jones/Sweet Pea
Series: Lovers in a dangerous time [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1659886
Comments: 8
Kudos: 93





	These fragile bodies of touch and taste

**Author's Note:**

> Response to a prompt on [tumblr](https://yukichouji.tumblr.com/) by gypsymishka that read as follows:
> 
> _I wish they'd kept their original Jughead being deaf/hoh idea so much and in my head he still is but I love thinking that Jughead is low-key scared of the dark cause he takes his hearing aids out at night and not being able to see or hear would be genuinely terrifying? Imagine him crashing with sweet pea or fangs whenever power goes out and tryna subtly be touching him so he's oriented without his hearing aids_
> 
> This fill doesn't exactly match the prompt, actually, it only does in so far as it features hoh!Jughead being scared of the dark, but I hope you'll forgive me and maybe even enjoy it anyway <3
> 
> Please see end of chapter notes for further warnings and disclaimers.
> 
> Edit: Forgot to mention that the title is from the song 'Lovers in a dangerous time' by Bruce Cockburn. The song itself is not my cup of tea at all, but the lyrics are f*cking beautiful, so yeah. Here we are.

~*~*~

It happens so quickly Jughead doesn’t have time to react at all. He’s not even sure he manages to make a sound, before the brittle, creaky old floorboards give one last token protest beneath his feet and then just break away. The ground literally opening up beneath him and swallowing him whole. One moment he’s there with the others, following Sweet Pea through the abandoned, dilapidated residential at the edge of town, the next he’s not, his world plunged into a sudden, all-encompassing darkness.

For a moment he’s caught in that weird, weightless feeling of falling, his stomach dropping out, then something scrapes painfully across his back, he gets jerked around, hits the side of his head on something rough and cold, hard enough to have stars dance across his vision and a much too loud charge of static bursting in his ear. Then he hits the ground with a harsh thud, lading in a puddle of something rank and stale, wetness soaking into his clothes as his breath gets knocked out of his lungs. He hits his head again, on the wet ground and he has to close his eyes and his mouth against the dust that rains down from above, followed by more solid, heavier pieces of wood or plaster, trapping him where he is, and then there’s nothing at all.

~*~*~

Jughead doesn’t think he was born with defective hearing. There was some incident in his early childhood that did this to him, but he can’t remember anything about it or before it happened, there’s just this huge blank space in his head where his memories of that time should be, and his parents never talk about it. All he knows, mostly from what Archie remembers about the whole ordeal, is that Jughead spent a couple weeks in the hospital one summer and when he got back out, he was deaf on one ear (the left one) and wearing a hearing aid in the other (he’s got about 20% of his hearing left on that side).

Whenever Jughead used to ask about it, his dad got that look on his face like he was about to puke but trying really hard not to and his mom would wrap her fingers around the edge of the nearest solid surface (their kitchen counters, the dining table, the coffee table, anything within reach) until her knuckles turned white and Jughead would get scared that she’d either break that surface or her fingers. And afterwards, when they thought that Jughead had taken the hearing aid out for the night and gone to sleep, they’d fight so badly. He’d tried a couple of times to listen in on what they were saying, but he could never take it for long enough to figure out what was going on. He’s just get too scared.

And then, one day (Jughead would like to say out of the blue, but the truth is it had been coming for a long time, he’d just been trying very hard not to see it) his mom packed up Jellybean and left for Toledo. She’d told him that she’d come back for him once she and Jellybean had settled in, once she’d found a job and set up a stable base to raise two children on and Jughead had nodded quietly and promised her that he’d be alright, that it was OK and she wouldn’t need to worry about him. Both of them had been lying and both of them had known.

His dad had been spiraling long before his mom had up and left, he’d lost his job at Andrew’s Construction a year ago and they’d been forced to sell the house on the Northside they could no longer afford and move to Sunnyside Trailer Park, the trailer they were able to afford much too small to comfortably fit four people. And after mom and Jellybean were gone, it got even worse. The only time of the day he’d see his dad half-way sober would be some time between morning and late afternoon, when he’d just woken up and not yet poured himself another shot of whatever cheap hard liquor he’d had stashed around the house at the time.

Jughead’s hearing aid is old and cheap, because they couldn’t really afford anything else (they’d barely managed to scrape together the money for this one a couple years ago, when he’d outgrown his first and even then his parents had spent so much time fighting about it Jughead’d almost thought he’d go crazy) and it only workes right, like, half of the time. The settings are ill-balanced, he can either choose between just a tad bit too low or too high and that makes interacting with other people way harder than it is already.

Archie and Betty being the only ones, who’d had the patience to put up with him and his troubles throughout most of his life. They’d known each other for so long that the two of them’d had plenty of time to get used to it, Jughead supposes. The aid is also pretty chunky and therefore painfully obvious, just like his last one. He’d been teased about it a lot in primary school, until one day, after he’d been crying about it to his mom, she’d come home with a gray, crown-shaped beanie she’d found at a thrift store and Jughead had been so excited about it. He’d loved he thing obsessively right form the start, because it was warm and soft and something his mom got for him, and he could pull it all the way down over his ears so that no-one would be able to see his hearing aid any more.

It didn’t keep the kids in his class from picking on him for other stuff, but he felt more comfortable, more at ease, safer, when he was wearing his beanie, so he just never took it off unless he absolutely had to. A habit that aged with him, his feeling of self-consciousness about his physical shortcomings like an old and dear friend, never far from his side.

He can’t really wear the aid, if he wants to be able to sleep, either, because of the constant, electrical humming it emits. During the day, when other sounds are loud enough to drown it out, it doesn’t really bother him, he’d gotten used to that soon enough. But at night, when everything else is quiet, it drives him crazy. And that’s the reason why he’d spent night after night lying awake on the couch in the living room, after his mom and Jellybean had left.

Because he couldn’t sleep as long as he was wearing his hearing aid, but he was too scared to take it it out before his dad got home. He never knew, if his dad would make it home on his own, or if the phone would ring in the middle of the night, Hogeye, the Wyrm’s bartender on the other end of the line asking him to come pick up his dad and drag him home, because he’d gotten too drunk to make it on his own. Or if his dad would stumble into the trailer dead drunk, knocking things down, tripping over stuff and Jughead never knew if his dad might hurt himself in the process and then Jughead wouldn’t notice, if he couldn’t hear him.

During the first week after his mom was gone, his dad had stumbled over the coffee table and fallen onto the couch, where Jughead’d been sleeping and accidentally caught Jughead’s face with his elbow. Jughead’d had to explain away a black eye for a week or so and he still can’t decide what was worse, the shame he’d felt at having to lie about it or the absolute horror and self-loathing he’d seen on his dad’s face whenever his dad’d looked at him after. So he basically ended up not sleeping at all.

Right up until he just couldn’t take it any more, the summer before junior year of high school and he decided that being homeless would be better than having to go through all of that anymore, than having to sit by and watch his dad self-destruct bit by excruciating bit and be unable to do a single damn thing to stop him. Because God knows Jughead’d tried.

Sleeping without his hearing aid had turned into even more of an anxious gamble during that time, never knowing if someone might find him where he wasn’t supposed to be staying, whether that someone carried ill intentions or not. And it had left him with an underlying fear of the dark and the quiet, that was hard to shake, even now that he had an actual roof over his head, a room of his own with a door that closed and his mom and Jellybean were back and his dad had been sober for over a year. Never mind that his mom had turned out to be Riverdale’s new drug queen pin and the house they were living in was his ex-girlfriend and still best friend’s childhood home and that the money his mom had used to buy it with was plenty dirty.

It’s not all bad, though. He’s got the Serpents, for one. The family he’d always yearned for but never thought he’d actually find. They know about his condition and still, not one of them has ever thought to make fun of him for it. All of them know what it’s like to live under less than ideal circumstances. They all have their own sorrows, their own hardships to deal with and the Serpents make it a rule to not judge each other by any of it. They actually see _him_ , not his condition, they see his wits and his resourcefulness and all of the things that make him good at being a leader and when they challenge him or his position it’s always for reasons that make sense and never for his physical shortcomings.

Jughead’s never known what it could feel like to be accepted in such a way, to be a part of something, to have that sort of connection and support, and he’s determined to keep it safe at any cost. He offered up his life to protect his fellow Serpents once and he’d do it all over in a heartbeat. Plus, the Serpents are the reason he got to know Sweet Pea. And that in itself is a pretty big deal already.

Because so far, Sweet Pea has kind of turned out to be the best thing that’s happened to Jughead, maybe ever. Betty and Jughead had dipped their toes into the whole relationship thing for, like, a second, but pretty quickly figured out that they just worked better as friends and it had been easy enough to come to terms with that on both sides. With Sweet Pea, though, it just feels _right._ They just clicked somehow. Kind of like a puzzle piece falling into place.

Jughead feels safe with Sweet Pea, safe and accepted and free to be who he is without having to worry about it and while Sweet Pea is fiercely protective of Jughead, he still never lets that lead him to undermine Jughead’s authority in front of the other Serpents or challenge his leadership unless it makes sense. It feels a little as though Sweet Pea is the thing Jughead’d been looking for all this time without even really knowing that he’d _been_ looking in the first place.

Knowing that Sweet Pea has his back makes this whole shit show with his mom and the Gargoyles, with G&G and Hiram Lodge and the weird cult that has taken up residence in Riverdale so much more bearable. Which, in the end, kind of leads him back to where he is now. In a crumbling old, abandoned residential at the edge of town together with Sweet Pea and Fangs and a handful of other Serpents. They’d gotten a tip about a group of guys in weird gargoyle masks hanging around the place and decided to check it out.

They hadn’t found any trace of the Gargoyles and, if Jughead had known that it would end quite this badly, he wouldn’t have gone for it at all. But you know what they say about hindsight… To put it succinctly: It’s a bitch.

~*~*~

Jughead comes to slowly and it takes him a moment to even fully grasp that he’s awake, because the darkness around him is so complete he can’t see shit. It’s like he’s stuck inside his own head, which hurts pretty badly by the way. A dull, throbbing sensation that radiates out from the back of his head and a sharper, more immediate pain at the side, just above his right ear.

He can’t hear _anything_ either, not even that insistent, nails-on-a-chalk-board electrical humming and that, the absoluteness of the silence, tells him there’s definitely something wrong with his hearing aid. He can feel that familiar sense of trepidation that comes attached to the thought, to that innate feeling of helplessness, and he has to concentrate hard to keep his breathing even and to stop the panic that tries to rush in. Jughead doesn’t know how long he’s been out, but the others have to have noticed what happened. He tries to move and immediately regrets it. Pain shoots through his back, sharp and hot, followed by softer pangs of discomfort all over. He groans, the motion vibrating through his chest and up his throat and then spiraling out into nothing, the sound it normally translates into lost to him.

It feels like he’s stuck in an isolation tank, robbed of both his sight and his hearing, left with nothing but his sense of touch and smell and taste, only one of which is even moderately useful right now. And once he tries to move again and realizes that he actually can’t, that there’s some sort of weight on top of him, effectively immobilizing him, pinning him down, he can’t stop his throat form pulling tight, his breath from losing it’s rhythm and his heartbeat from accelerating dangerously anymore.

Jughead screws his eyes shut as tightly as he can, even though it doesn’t really make a difference, tires to focus on anything but the steel band of fear that’s gradually pulling tighter around his chest. There’s the taste of dust and copper in his mouth (he thinks he may have bitten his tongue during the fall) and a weird feeling like his tongue is coated with something dry and unpleasant. There’s the smell of mold, of old wood and wet plaster, the feeling of something cold and wet having soaked through his beanie and his jeans all along the back of his legs. A more concrete catalog of his injuries. Bruises, cuts and scrapes mostly and one long line of heat across his back, starting at his left shoulder, the sensations stark and real. Even if all of it translates into discomfort, it still helps him calm down enough to be able to think a little more clearly again.

There must be some kind of hollow space beneath the house, a cellar they didn’t see an entry to on their first swipe, or some kind of unusually tall crawl space, Jughead guesses, and he must have fallen into it when he crashed through the brittle floor boards. He tries again to test if he has some wriggle room somewhere, more carefully this time and after a bit, he actually manages to get his left hand free.

The rest of his limbs are wedged tightly, though, too much so to do anything about it and when he tries to shift his right ankle, something comes loose and crashes down onto his leg, something hard and heavy with jagged edges and he feels but doesn’t hear the yelp that rushes up his throat at the sudden, bright burst of pain. More vibrations follow that first shift, a coating of dust and a few larger particles raining down onto his face and something longish and round at one side slides down to pin down his right shoulder more firmly.

The panic rises again. He’s trapped, he can’t get free and he has no idea how much more rubble there is piled up above him, ready to slide loose and crush him if he makes a wrong move and he can’t see or hear shit and his lungs are working overtime but it still feels like he’s not getting enough air.

The world around him is starting to feel fuzzy, muted and he knows how dangerous that is, knows that he can’t fucking afford to lose it right now, regardless of the flood of memories that’s trying to accost him, of all of the horrible things that have happened, that could have happened, to him in the dark, of how the fear keeps amplifying, feeding on itself and growing, and he has to get a fucking grip or he’s going to get himself killed.

Sweet Pea and the others are probably up there right now, looking for him, working to get him out. All he has to do is keep still and wait. And wait. And wait. The thought of Sweet Pea helps a little and Jughead tries to cling to that, tries to conjure up the warmth he feels whenever Sweet Pea is near, the calm, the sense of peace and belonging. The way Sweet Pea’s touch makes his skin light up like a fucking Christmas tree and his heart do that weird, fluttery little dance in the hollow of his chest.

Sweet Pea and the others are going to get him out of here, he _knows_ , all Jughead has to do is have faith in them. Even with that, though, Jughead just can’t make himself lie there quietly and do nothing. So, even though he can’t hear himself do it, he opens his mouth and he starts to call out. He gets some of the dust into his throat at the first try when he inhales too sharply and he has to stop in order to get through the coughing fit that follows. But he tries again after, forms the words in his head, ‘help’, ‘I’m down here’, ‘Sweet Pea’, ‘get me out of here’, and he sends them down into his lungs and then up his throat and out across his tongues and past his lips, a series of shifts and vibrations that echo through the different parts of him and God he hopes they come out right.

More time passes with nothing happening and he can feel himself become more frantic, the muscles in his throat starting to protest the abuse, the cold that seeps in from around him becoming more pressing and so, even though he knows he should probably really keep still, he starts to try and feel his way around with his one free hand again. There’s a pressure building in his chest, an itch underneath his skin, a horrible sort of claustrophobia that he thinks might push him right over the edge, if he doesn’t try to _move_ , to do _something_. And, if he loses it now, he’s just going to end up crushed to death, suffocated because his lungs no longer have room to expand in his chest, alone and scared and fuck he needs to think about something else so badly.

Jughead manages to find a gap in the rubble caging him in and he shoves his hand through and upwards, concentrating solely on that. Something sharp and jagged scrapes along his fingers, his wrist, but he clenches his teeth against the pain and keeps on pushing. The rubble around him shifts again, dangerously, and he has to stop for a moment until it settles, holding his breath, the rush of blood making him feels dizzy and disoriented, but then he picks back up where he left up, unable to let it go.

He keeps reaching upward and then, when he’s gotten almost as far as the length of his arm will allow, he finds a smaller gap just up ahead and he wedges his hand through, feeling of skin being scraped away from his knuckles, the pain of it only feeding into his desperate need to keep going. And then his hand is through and he’s as far as he can get. There’s nothing else there and, for a terrifying moment, the panic threatens to overtake, but then, out of no-where, a hand closes around his and Jughead feels like he can breathe again.

The hand is big and warm and familiar and Jughead would know the feel of it anywhere. It grips him tight enough to make his bones creak, but Jughead doesn’t try to pull away, instead clings to it with all the strength he can muster. Sweet Pea brushes his thumb across Jughead’s wrist, soft and soothing, a stark contrast to the grip he’s got on Jughead’s hand and Jughead tries to focus all of his senses on that feeling. On the knowledge that Sweet Pea’s here, even if he can’t see him or hear him, Jughead can _feel_ him and he _knows_ that he’s going to be alright.

It’s the lifeline he’d needed, Sweet Pea’s touch, a connection to the real world, and Jughead holds on tightly and bit by bit, he starts to see more and more light streaming in through the rubble above as bits and pieces of it are being moved out of the way. After a while, he sees hands moving, then as his field of vision widens, the arms and shoulders attached to those hands and, eventually, faces too, if a bit blurry and staticky. He sees Fangs and the others working, sees the joyful relief that washes over Fangs’ face as soon as he spots Jughead down below.

It doesn’t take much longer for them to get him free after that, thank God, and through it all, Sweet Pea never once lets go of his hand. As soon as all of the rubble holding him trapped is gone, Fangs and Sweet Pea combine efforts to drag him out of the hole in the flooring and back up into the light. Sweet Pea’s face plops into his field of vision and quickly blots out everything else. He looks angry and worried and Jughead can see his lips moving, but the world is still wrapped up in a swallowing, cottony silence and his vision is too wobbly for him to be able to read Sweet Pea’s lips.

Jughead starts to shake his head but quickly aborts when the motion just makes him feel really dizzy and Sweet Pea’s hands shoot up to his shoulders to steady him. ‘I think my hearing aid is broken’ Jughead tries to say, but he has no idea, if it’s loud enough or clear enough and he reaches up a shaky hand to feel around his right ear.

The skin there is moist and kind of sticky and he plucks the hearing aid from his ear as soon as the tips of his fingers brush against it and then holds it up so that he can see. Sure enough, the aid is busted, the casing broken and its insides, tiny wires and electronics, spill out like guts. The hand holding it doesn’t exactly look all that great either, coated in a grayish-green sheen of dust, speckled with red and raw patches of scraped skin.

‘Fuck.’ He curses, even though it’s not as satisfactory when he can’t hear himself do it and he screws his eyes shut and presses the heel of his free hand against one of them, trying to keep the despair that surges up at bay. He’s tired and he’s hurting and he’s got no idea how bad any of it is, but the fact that his hearing aid is dead is somehow the worst of it. Because he knows there’s no way he’ll be able to afford to replace it any time soon and he’ll die before he asks his mom for help and that means he’ll be stuck like this, deaf to the world, essentially useless, for God knows how long.

He feels like fucking crying. Why does this shit always have to happen to him?

A pair of arms wraps around his shoulders and pulls tight, wedges him up against Sweet Pea’s chest and Jughead lets himself be held. Lets his own arms fall away and drape around Sweet Pea’s middle in turn, lets Sweet Pea spread a warm palm over the small of his back, card his fingers through the hairs at the back of Jughead’s neck that stick out from underneath his beanie, regardless of how many bruises and scrapes Sweet Pea’s upsetting with his touch.

He soaks up the heat and the solidity of Sweet Pea’s body, in front of him and all around him, buries his face against Sweet Pea’s chest and breathes in his scent, spicy and clean and well-known and allows himself a moment to wallow in his own self-pity. But that hollowness in his chest, that quiet despair, doesn’t last. Can’t with how safe and warm Sweet Pea, being held by him, makes Jughead feel and, after a bit of only slightly embarrassing sniffling, Jughead manages to collect himself enough to pull away again and face the world.

He opens his eyes to find Sweet Pea looking at him, intent and worried. ‘Let’s get you home’ Sweet Pea mouths, slow and precise and this time, Jughead has no trouble reading his lips. He feels drained and he’s in pain and all he wants is a long hot shower and his bed, so he wipes a furtive hand across his eyes to get rid of the moisture there and nods his head in agreement.

Before Sweet Pea turns to head out, though, he reaches down and closes a gentle hand around Jughead’s, the one that’s still holding the sad remains of his hearing aid, and squeezes once carefully. Making sure Jughead’s looking at his face, Sweet Pea mouths ‘we’ll figure something out’ and gives him a lopsided little smile, filled with more confidence than Jughead can muster at the moment.

In a way, though, Jughead still believes him. He doesn’t see it right now, a solution to this fucking mess, but he’s not alone in it. Sweet Pea won’t just up and abandon him because he’s become an inconvenience and neither will the rest of the Serpents. All he sees on their faces when he looks around is the same sort of worry and relief he saw on Sweet Pea’s. These people are his family, not by blood, but by a bond stronger than that, by choosing, and he knows he can count on them to have his back. That thought alone is enough to keep him going for now.

~*~*~

**Author's Note:**

> I have no experiences with being hoh and while I did a little bit of research, I know I probably won't have managed an accurate depiction of what it's like. I in no way mean any harm or disrespect. This is a work of fiction and is meant for entertainment purposes only. 
> 
> The negative view Jughead has on his condition in no way reflects my own view on it and I sincerely hope that no-one feels offended by any of this. If you do find that I got something grossly wrong, please feel free to let me know~
> 
> Thank you <3


End file.
